I want to buy something with an upscaler and I am familiar with the Oppos that Gonk talks about. My question is if any of the blue ray or HD-DVD players also upscale on the level of the Oppo.

thanks.

The Toshiba HD-DVD players perform fairly comparably to the OPPO players (the XA2 does a better job, albeit it at a fair bit more money). I picked up an HD-A2 a few months ago, and some fairly intermittent comparisons between it and the 981HD suggest that they are pretty closely matched. The 981HD offers a few things the A2 doesn't (DVD-Audio and SACD being two biggies), and of course at the moment I'm still kicking the 980H 's tires, which leaves the 981HD and HD-A2 relegated to the sidelines to a degree (they're piped through a MonoPrice HDMI switch for video to the 990's DVI2 input and connected with two optical cables for audio to the 990, but are not seeing a whole lot of use).

I haven't kept as close an eye on the Blu-ray players - the prices are coming down quickly, but the feature sets are still evolving a bit slowly in comparison to HD-DVD. I have a bit less anxiety about the future of Blu-ray than the future of HD-DVD based just on the software catalogs (which is why I have the cheapest HD-DVD player and own almost no HD-DVD's), but so far I haven't yet seen a Blu-ray player that made me want to spend my money. That's just me, though. The PS3 is said to do a pretty solid job with upscaling DVD's using the latest firmware, and Panasonic's player seems to be a pretty impressive performer.

I own a Oppo 981HD that I use with my main upstairs 65" HDTV. The picture quality upsampled is excellent . . . but will never = HD. That said, the unit can play just about any format you throw at it (including dual layer DVD r+). Ofcourse it won't play Blu and HD-DVD. For the price, you really can't go wrong.

However, on the downstairs system I have the 20gb PS3 hooked up to a smaller HDTV. The blu-ray image is excellent. Prior to the software upgrade, the regular DVD upsampling was poor (for old PS2 games too). With the software upgrade the upsampling is quite good. The unit is also basically a computer that can also serve as a media player, game system, blu player, DVD player, and limited internet browser. I guess what I am most impressed with is the continue efforts to software upgrade the unit post purchase.

All that said, the cost of buying a hi-def disc (either format) is prohibitive to me ($25-$35 each) . . . I'll wait another year to buy a combine HD/Blu player for the main living room . . .

This is a very good point - and, even though I suspect from knownalien's post that he's already aware of this truth, it's still worth pointing out in general. No player (standard DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray) or standalone video scaler can take a DVD and produce a true HD quality image. Even the best scaling approaches are also going to be dependent to some degree on the quality of the DVD transfer - a really good transfer can yield some really impressive upscaled results, even if it doesn't directly equal true high-def.

I have an oppo 981 and a ps3. Before an upscaling update to the PS3 there was a huge difference between the upscaling performance of the two. Since the update, I can barely tell a difference between them. I am considering getting rid of the Oppo.

For reference: I run DVI Gear HDMI cables directly to my Sony KDS 60A-2000 from each, and BlueJeans Digital Coax to my 990 from each.